


Tear in My Heart

by vickydd



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Derek Hale Deserves Nice Things, Derek Hale's Terrible Life, Hunters, Hurt Derek, Hurt Stiles, M/M, Post-Season/Series 02, Pre-Slash, Road Trip, allies to friends, mostly canon compliant, non-graphic depictions of gore, sterek, tear in my heart by twenty one pilots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-07
Updated: 2016-10-07
Packaged: 2018-08-20 03:39:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8234810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vickydd/pseuds/vickydd
Summary: Stiles swiped at a bead of sweat on his forehead, wincing when his hand rubbed against his bruised cheek. His eyes went to a place at his feet, and his hands fidgeted with the edge of his shirt, like a boy caught stealing candy.“I got two hours before your shower woke me up today, and maybe four yesterday. Plus, my Adderall actually ran out the day the hunters found us, I just didn’t tell you.”Derek barely stopped himself from growling, but couldn’t hold back the eye roll as he slid back into his seat, muscles stiff. “And now your lunch is on the side of the highway, so you’re probably slightly sick, suffering from withdrawal, hungry, and exhausted. Great,” he deadpans. “Get in here before you pass out in your own vomit and I’m tempted to leave you.”Stiles looks highly offended, but his amber eyes are a little clearer, so Derek takes it as a win and scowls to show the boy he’s not kidding.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I'm loving the sweet one shot life, and I'm hoping you guys are loving it too!  
> Here's a cutesy preslash Sterek with a little bit of angst, a little bit of fluff, and a little bit of supernatural shenanigans.  
> Everything you need to know is in the tags, but if not, please let me know!  
> Inspired by Tear in My Heart by Twenty One Pilots.  
> Hope you like it!

_Sometimes you’ve got to bleed to know,  
That you're alive and have a soul._

Getting hit with this many bullets should hurt more, Derek thinks.

“Oh my god, oh my god, you are _so_ not getting in my car like that. No way.”

Derek rips his grip away from where he’s applying pressure to his wounds and closes his hand roughly on Stiles shoulder with enough force that the boy slams against his Jeep. No words are necessary for the message he needs to get across, and he doesn’t think he can open his mouth without spitting blood anyway, so the way Stiles sputters nervously in response works in his favor.

“Fine, fine,” the boy stammers, the scent of overwhelming anxiety filling Derek’s nostrils. He carefully grabs Derek by the shoulder to help him up into the jeep, wincing at the blood left on his hands and his shoulder, “Okay, here.”

Derek slumps in relief at not having to hold himself up any longer as Stiles slams the door and enters from the driver’s side. He starts the car and pulls out of the dark field and onto the highway a couple miles off, clenching and unclenching his fists on the steering wheel in an agitated manner.

“Where are we going?” Stiles asks, eyeing him up and down and wincing.

Derek already knows he mustn’t look pretty, so he tries not to take it to heart. The smell of nerves nearly doubles.

“Calm down, Stiles,” he spits, little flecks of blood getting on the dashboard in front of him.

“Oh my god, my car. Oh my god. Where are we going, huh, Derek? Cause we’re in the middle of god knows where, miles away from Beacon Hills because of your little monster hunt – which didn’t even lead to any monsters, there were just stupid hunters trying to track down even _stupider_ alphas, and the hunters didn’t _just_ beat me up and fill you with bullets, they also took all your money. Which was most of _our_ money. I’m just gas money; really _sore_ gas money.”

Stiles’s nervous chatter must have distracted him from his surroundings, because only Derek yelling at him to stop made him notice the crappy and barren Motel sign off the next right.

Falling quiet, Stiles took the turn and continued quietly all the way to Motel, only moving at a groan from Derek to take off his plaid at a red light and throw it at him. Derek tried to grunt in response, but every breath made one of the bullets scrape against his spine or rib or collarbone. He was bleeding out onto the seats terrifyingly quickly.

As Stiles parked and got another good look at him, he grimaced. “Christ, how am I even gonna get you in there. You’re a mess.”

Stiles drops down the sunlight shields and opens the mirror compartment. “Hell, I’m a mess.” 

It was true. There is deep blue and purple coloring all around Stiles’s cheek and left eye, so much so that Derek wonders how he’d been able to drive safely with his damaged vision.

“Go,” he growls, feeling lightheaded. It hurt to think, the lights were starting to blur and he could barely make out the motel or Stiles as the boy walked away into the darkness.

Derek didn’t know if he fell unconscious or he just didn’t remember how much time had passed, but suddenly Stiles is helping him out of the car and through a looming metal door to a musty room with a bed, couch, sparse furniture and a digital clock. _3:17_ displayed the screen. The green numbers blur in his vision and he collapses onto the queen sized bed in the center of the room as soon as Stiles lets go of him.

“The bull. . .ets,” he groans, tasting iron, and he hears Stiles swear. The boy says something else, but then the fabric wrapped around Derek’s torso is lifted and excruciating pain begins in his shoulder, so he doesn’t hear. Then his right rib. Then at the base of his back. Lastly, his left thigh.

He feels a touch on his face, realizes it is a slap, but doesn’t register the pain over the ache of his body trying to stitch itself back together prematurely. It needs time.

“Derek, Derek,” he hears, and Derek blinks in response, his voice failing him.

“. . . Wolfsbane,” Stiles pleads, “I need to know if the bullets were wolfsbane.”

He wants to shake his head, wants to let this frantic Stiles know that the boy has done his part – better than he could have possibly anticipated – that he’s done, but he can’t tell if he’s doing it or not. He can barely see.

“No,” he manages, the taste of blood ever present in his mouth.

“Oh god, thank you. I’m done. Good night. I’m going to sleep. No, I’m going to shower; I need to get your blood off me – now. Please don’t die while I’m in the shower. Or while I sleep. Oh god. . .”

He drifts off, further and further away, and Derek welcomes unconsciousness with open arms.

_But it takes someone to come around to show you how._

_My heart is my armor,  
He’s the tear in my heart;_

The first thing he notices when he wakes up is that the sticky, stuffy, and uncomfortable feeling of dried blood is not present. In fact, he’s wearing a new shirt, boxers, and sweats. A ratty blanket has been placed over him, and he’s alone on the bed.

Being freshly healed and seeing things with regained clarity, Derek notices that the room is painted a crappy dark green with mismatched furniture forming a little desk and wardrobe – no TV – and an even sketchier looking maroon couch, which holds one snoring and bruised Stiles Stilinski.

The wave of gratitude that arises in Derek as he looks over Stiles’s crooked and unpleasant positioning on the couch (his head was nearly touching the floor and his legs seemed to be as far apart as humanly possible) makes him swallow harshly and sit up, suddenly feeling claustrophobic. The last person who ever did something like this for him had been Laura, and he knows well how she ended up.

Stiles had grown his hair out over the summer, and Derek still remembers the way the boy had nervously tugged at it as he hesitated between accompanying Derek on this trip to track a potential monster murderer, or help Scott with summer school and getting over Allison.

The left side of the boy’s face, the side facing him, is swollen and slowly yellowing. Nasty green, blue, and purple hues decorate the side of Stiles’s skinny torso uncovered by the blanket he is using.

Derek realizes that the t-shirt he is wearing is definitely Stiles’s then. Derek had only brought two, and they’d both reached their ends covered in blood.

After a particular loud and peculiar snore from Stiles, Derek averts his eyes, aware that he was creeping.

Needing something to do, he stands up and walks, only a little sorely, to the bathroom, finding the mirror, toilet, sink and shower a little down for wear, but usable all the same. He can smell Stiles’s sweat mixed in with his own blood, something a little bit more than disgusting, but he ignores it in favor of turning on the shower and carefully removing and folding his clothing.

He observes his torso, looking for remains of the bullet wounds that had healed overnight. He looks okay, if not a little red and patchy in some places and slightly underfed. He enters the shower, sighing in relief when he feels the hot water rushing over his sore muscles.

When he finishes cleaning up (Stiles had done a very thorough clean, only missing a couple patches of blood and sweat in the more private areas. Derek didn’t know how to feel about this.), he redresses only in the sweatpants. He’s surprised to see Stiles awake and lying on the bed, dressed in slightly bloodstained clothing when he re-enters the room.

The boy immediately sits up, but they barely meet eyes before Stiles blushes and lies back down, leg bouncing in place where it hangs off the bed.

Derek senses his embarrassment and assumes it has something to do with Derek waking up dressed and clean, so he tries to reassure the boy. “Thanks for the clothes. And the cleaning.”

Stiles lifts his head for a second, as if to make sure Derek is serious – which he is – and then drops it back down, hands fidgeting with a corner of the ratty blanket.

“You’ve been asleep for two days, man,” Stiles says. “I just figured you’d want to be clean and dressed, you know.”

It’s obvious the boy is trying to brush it off, considering Derek almost never says thank you. “Plus, I had a lot of experience dressing and taking care of Jackson with the whole Kanima thing – not that I, you know, do that often, it was only once—”

It takes one annoyed look to make the boy fall silent, gulping as he nods in understanding. “Shutting up.”

Derek takes another look around the room in search of their stuff. He needs to look at his phone, if it even still works after the hunters shattered the screen. They’d done the same to Stiles’s, and they need to be able to communicate.

“Don’t worry,” Stiles tells him, “I checked for bed bugs. And anything else.”

That’s not what he’d been worried about, but Derek nods anyway. “You said I was asleep for two days?”

That’s a surprise to him – it barely felt like a night.

“Yeah,” he sits up to reply, looking like he’d already gone over all this multiple times. “Other than my Adderall running out and me calling Scott so he knew where we were, a couple hundred miles north of Redding, by the way, nothing much has happened.”

Derek doesn’t know too much about human disorders, but he understands that being cooped up in a sparse room like this is probably hell for Stiles’s ADHD.

 “Is that bad?” he asks, spotting the duffle they’d brought and opening it up.

Stiles sits up, avoiding eye contact.  “Is what bad? Being in Redding?”

“Your Adderall.”

He flops back down and gestures to the keys on the little desk beside the bed. “Kind of. Just don’t expect me to concentrate on anything for too long. And as much as it pains me to admit this, you’ll probably have to drive us back.”

Derek nods. Stiles still looks like he’s merely accepting something he’s gone over many times in his head, and Derek gets his first reason to believe it has actually been two days.

“Okay. When do we leave?” his stomach growls as he speaks and he feels his cheeks darken. “Or at least, where do we _eat_?” he adds, pulling on the borrowed shirt.

“We leave when we have gas money,” Stiles admits a little sheepishly, defeated. “The room drained me, so there should be enough to get back to the tiny little town a couple miles east, but after that we’re out. And food is also that way. I saved you a Big Mac and some stale fries, since they were the only things I could afford. Little towns have expensive McDonalds, like Jesus Christ.”

Derek’s lips twitch, and as he sits on the creaky chair to start on his Big Mac and stale fries, he can’t help feeling a little relieved. At least Stiles is with him.

_He’s a carver, he’s a butcher with a smile, cut me farther,  
Than I’ve ever been._

_You fell asleep in my car, I drove the whole time,  
But that’s ok, I’ll just avoid the holes so you sleep fine._

The Jeep stutters to life under Derek’s hands, the feeling of an old car familiar to Derek from when he used to drive his dad’s old Chevy truck in high school, and they’re off. After hitting town and Derek threatening a thug for his drug money (Stiles was highly amused when the guy had taken a look at him and dropped his bag before running. Derek was a little impressed with himself – he didn’t even have the leather jacket on, and he was sporting a forest green shirt. The blood on his tattered jeans might have given the thug some delusions, though), they stocked up and headed out.

An hour in, Stiles – who Derek had thought might actually end up bouncing right out of the car his heartbeat was so quick – tells him to pull over. When he does, a little hesitantly because they both want to get home and Stiles had just gone to the bathroom half an hour ago, so, what the hell did he want?

The answer, it turns out, is that Stiles takes two steps off the roadside before hunching over and puking the Mexican food they’d had for lunch all over the pavement.

“Stiles?” Derek asks, wondering if he should get out to help the boy, but Stiles puts out a hand to stop him.

“Gimme a- a sec. Just the withdrawal, I-I’m okay—” he paused to dry heave “—ish.”

Derek unbuckles and slides down the seat far enough to grip Stiles’s shoulder and take away the pain. The quicker this went away the quicker they could get a move on, he tells himself.

Stiles makes e a soft sound of thanks before retching again. Derek quietly observes the leather of the Jeep’s seat and is slightly amazed to see that the Jeep looks nearly the same, if not for a couple of darker spots that could be mistaken for food spills.

Stiles must’ve gone out right away the first night to clean it. Which was smart, he guessed, because a bloody car would be very suspicious. A small burst off inexplicable anger pushed at him, directed at the boy whose shoulder he held.

Finally, Stiles stood up straight and Derek’s hand slid off, along with the pressure of added pain in his gut and throat. The anger only worsened.

“Good?” he asked, trying to sound nonchalant. Stiles’s heartbeat was still off, although definitely slower, just a little more uneven. When he turned around, wiping the remaining vomit and spit from his lips and nodding, Derek cringed. The smell of exhaustion and sickness was a little much, and understanding dawned on Derek.

“Did you even sleep at all the last two nights?” he asked, the anger bubbling to the surface in a snarl. He didn’t need Stiles getting sick on him, and just because the boy was taking care of him didn’t mean he shouldn’t have been taking care of himself.

Stiles swiped at a bead of sweat on his forehead, wincing when his hand rubbed against his bruised cheek. His eyes went to a place at his feet, and his hands fidgeted with the edge of his shirt, like a boy caught stealing candy.

“I got two hours before your shower woke me up today, and maybe four yesterday. Plus, my Adderall actually ran out the day the hunters found us, I just didn’t tell you.”

Derek barely stopped himself from growling, but couldn’t hold back the eye roll as he slid back into his seat, muscles stiff. “And now your lunch is on the side of the highway, so you’re probably slightly sick, suffering from withdrawal, hungry, _and_ exhausted. Great,” he deadpans. “Get in here before you pass out in your own vomit and I’m tempted to leave you.”

It’s a lot to say, and he’s slightly breathless when he’s done. The anger has yet to fade.

Stiles looks highly offended, but his amber eyes are a little clearer, so Derek takes it as a win and scowls to show Stiles he’s not kidding.

When they head back out, it’s barely twenty minutes of tense silence only stilted by the low tunes of a static filled alternative radio station before Derek looks over to find Stiles dead sleep. His mouth has drool on one corner and his fidgeting has finally stopped, so Derek turns up the radio and pays attention to the road.

Of course, this only lasts another two hours, because Derek hears it happen before he feels it, and he barely has time to pull into the next exit and park on the side of the road before the car dies with a loud crack and black smoke that doesn’t sound like it could be anything good.

He opens the door only to shut it right away at the smell of fumes. The slam of the door closing is loud, and Stiles jerks awake, hitting his head on the window and blinking a couple of times before noticing the dark smoke emitting from the hood and clouding the windows.

“My car!” he exclaims, sending Derek a disbelieving look. “What did you do to my car?”

He shrugs, and while he’s still annoyed with Stiles for not taking care of himself, the guilt of exploding at him earlier keeps him at bay. The boy is still sickly pale and a little sweaty, but he definitely looks more alert and less on edge.

“Must be the exhaust. I know a thing or two about old cars, but I need some tools,” he explains. “Do you have anything in here?”

Stiles is wide eyed in worry, but his face falls abruptly at that. “Other than duct tape and a couple of wrenches? Not really.”

Derek resists the urge pound his fist into the wheel out of frustration and asks Stiles where the stuff is. They’ll just have to make do, and hopefully Stiles doesn’t have a seizure on him.

_I’m driving here I sit, cursing my government,  
For not using my taxes to fill holes with more cement._

_He’s the tear in my heart, I’m alive,  
He’s the tear in my heart, I’m on fire._

It is a hot summer day, so Derek loses Stiles’s shirt to grease and sweat about thirty minutes in. There goes number three.

Stiles is slightly helpful, passing Derek things and keeping the annoying fidgeting and complaining to a minimum. At least he hasn’t started puking again. An hour in, Derek gives up.

“It’s not just the exhaust,” he explains to Stiles, who insists just using more duct tape will fix the problem, “the battery also short-circuited. We’re stuck.”

Stiles puckers his lips and nods exasperation. “Great! You don’t happen to see another motel around, do you? Maybe another thug around to rob? A working phone?” he says, holding up his own cracked phone, whose screen hasn’t changed from a fluorescent green since he tried turning it on earlier. 

Derek tries to analyze the situation. Beacon Hills can’t be less than an hour or so out, so they could call a tow and wait the probable two hours in the heat.

Derek makes Stiles call, and they sit on the side of the road together. Stiles lies down star fished half on the road and half on the grass, because apparently the boy doesn’t do anything normally, and talks.

His words vary from talk of Scott to his father to Lydia Martin and even Isaac; some things are funny and others simple teenage drama, so Derek is about to pass out into his own lap when he realizes Stiles is talking to him.

“. . .Derek?”

He lifts his head up, and raises a brow expectantly, not wanting to ask for Stiles to repeat himself.

Stiles rolls his eyes. “I asked you if you played any sports in high school.”

The question brings an onslaught of memories Derek likes to pretend aren’t his. Paige smiles at him when he meets her under the bleachers before the game for a good luck kiss, he feels the ice in his eyes as his claws cut deep in her pale skin, the winning shot that caught Kate’s attention when she came to one of his games, how proud he was to be captain, how easily he socialized and made friends – a selfish and arrogant bastard jock that could have put Jackson to shame.  

“Captain of the basketball team,” slips through his lips in a cocky manner, the stupid need to always pull on Stiles’s nerves surfacing. It’ll do him good to know that Derek isn’t just socially above him now, but was also socially above him in High School too.

When Stiles snorts and shakes his head in a depreciating manner, Derek smiles despite himself. Those memories aren’t things he can ever feel or recall lightly anymore, but just one question from this boy has him in smiles about them. His heart aches a little in his chest as he sneaks a glance at Stiles’s relaxed, although still sickly pale and bruised figure.

“Of course,” the boy accepts, and Derek’s eyes fall to his lips. The heat must be messing with him. “That must’ve got all the girls.”

There is a yearning undertone that, while Derek can’t sympathize with – he’s never had an issue in that category, with either sex – makes him take a moment to look at how different and alike the two of them are.

They have both suffered loss, and they are both, for a lack of a better word, lone wolfs. Stiles may have Scott and his dad and Derek may have Isaac, Erica, and Boyd, but they both have that same uprooting sense of loneliness to them. At the same time, they want entirely different things – Derek would give up everything he has for what Stiles has, and Stiles would sacrifice his own well-being to be appreciated most of the time.

It brings on an uncharacteristic need to share some wisdom, so he does. “There are other things much more important than high school drama and good looks, Stiles.”

The mood drops instantly and he can filter out the guilt and shock in Stiles’s gaze. Derek doesn’t feel as hot under the burning sun anymore, either.

“Right,” he says. “Sorry.”

And then Stiles does something weird. He reaches a hand out, long fingers that paint the picture of distinct strength, and squeezes it around Derek’s.

In response, Derek does something even weirder.

He squeezes back.

_He’s the tear in my heart, take me higher,  
Than I’ve ever been._

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and Kudos are life so make sure i don't die by letting me know how you liked it =)  
> I like this verse and if inspired may continue it with another shot of their actual getting together, that sort of thing.  
> Anyway, have an awesome day and thanks for reading!  
> You can find me on the Tumblrs as lumenalumia :)


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